JOSH GIBSON IS THE GREATEST OF ALL SLUGGERS? BASEBALL HAS BIGGER PROBLEMS
Commissioner Rob Manfred incorporated Negro League numbers with statistics of major-leaguers, which is nice but ignores logistics — they never played on the same fields — and disregards 2024 issues
Through scandals and television failures and klutz owners, baseball doesn’t have much left on the truth trail. Now, even statistics are met with skepticism. Nothing is more critical than the accurate value of numbers when weighing the greatest players ever, yet it’s vague — if not impossible — to compare the production of Negro Leaguers with those in the major leagues before the color barrier was broken.
To feel comfortable today and declare Josh Gibson as the sport’s all-time leader in three prime categories — batting average, slugging percentage, OPS — is subjective at best and dishonest at worst. It could be Gibson is better than Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds, but we’ll never know for certain because he played in a different league that existed between 1920 to 1948. The Negro Leagues performed in 60 to 80 official games while stopping on the road for makeshift opportunities — say, the Kansas City Monarchs would play local teams for money on the way to bigger towns. It was a horrific way to survive in a racist land.
Let’s not be fools and doubt the magnitude of the best players. But we must wonder about commissioner Rob Manfred and how he ignores basic realities and logistics — short schedules, incompatible leagues, quality of competition and roster depth for 2,300 players — and groups them together as part of MLB’s sacred record books. Suddenly, Cobb’s .367 batting average ranks second to Gibson’s .372, while Ruth’s all-time numbers of .690 slugging percentage and 1.164 OPS fall behind Gibson’s .718 and 1.177. How would you like to tell Cobb and Ruth, if they were living, that they’ve been toppled by a three-year research function?
All Manfred has done is whip open massive debates based on personal feelings and opinions. His struggling game would be better served by having no numbers or rankings. The Negro Leaguers thrived and became spiritual before and after Jackie Robinson arrived in the big leagues. Why create arguments in 2024? Gibson has been preserved with so many colleagues in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Why clog the digital base?
“Critics will say, ‘Well, (Gibson) only played against other Black teams,’ ” said Larry Lester, who spoke to the Athletic after serving on the committee to integrate records. “Well, Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a Black pitcher, and Josh Gibson never hit a home run off a white pitcher. So I guess my point is, the amount of melanin or the lack thereof does not indicate the greatness of a ballplayer.”
True, except statistics are real and calculated on the same ballfields. “My small fear is that the Negro League stats will be absorbed into major-league history and disappear like a Walmart coming to a town and all the mom-and-pop stores disappear,” said Lester, who is correct. “We want to immerse those stats with major-league stats but also keep their independence. That’s not easy to do. You want inclusion, but you want exclusivity at the same time.”
This will be another issue for Manfred, who can’t eliminate the ample messes on his desk. “This initiative is focused on ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible,” he said in a statement. “Their accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to broader learning about this triumph in American history and a path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodger debut.”
Wednesday, he told the Associated Press: “It’s a show of respect for great players who performed in the Negro Leagues due to circumstances beyond their control and once those circumstances changed demonstrated that they were truly major leaguers. Maybe the single biggest factor was the success of players who played in the Negro Leagues and then came to the big leagues.”
Still, Manfred acknowledges the polarity at stake. “The irregularity of their league schedules, established in the spring but improvised by the summer, were not of their making but instead were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” the statement said. So today, the commissioner is correcting those practices?
Or is he exacerbating societal hell he didn’t create?
Baseball should be locked in a mental condition of trying to remain alive in America. The collective bargaining agreement expires in two years, almost certain to be followed by a destructive labor impasse. The Dodgers wave Shohei Ohtani like a global revelation when only three or four teams can compete with them. The NFL is a media monster. The NBA and college football are making new mega-billions. Does baseball have any network or regional sports future? Isn’t it dwindling into niche-dom?
These are the questions the commissioner and his owners must answer. Instead, they are hiding in a data dive.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.